Tragic but arresting—a worthy companion to Simone de Beauvoir’s and Vivian Gornick’s explorations of the complicated...
A deeply personal account of the author’s thorny relationship with her mother.
One morning, while “leading an unremarkable life” with her husband and young sons in Montana, Sonnenberg received a phone call with the news that her mother had been severely, probably fatally injured in a car accident. She set about making arrangements to fly to Barbados, where her mother lived, then changed her mind. They were already estranged, but this decision put a definitive end to the single most important and dependent relationship of the author’s life. It also led to a breach with her sister, who was outraged that she wouldn’t come to an apparently dying woman’s bedside, then was stuck with the caretaking responsibilities when their mother recovered. The author’s remembrances are designed to justify her decision not to go. She depicts her mother as a stunning and seductive pathological liar with a long history of cocaine and painkiller abuse, as well as unscrupulous sexual behavior. The author spent many years entangled in her mother’s capricious demands, often unable to discern truth from lies. The shocking details Sonnenberg provides about her upbringing certainly show her mother behaving recklessly. The lack of maternal nurturing prompted a hunger in her for fulfillment elsewhere, first in romantic relationships and then as a mother herself. Yet they were close for decades, albeit often in an unhealthy way. Readers may not entirely understand the author’s extreme choice to end contact altogether, or entirely credit her assertion that the distance between them now serves as a comfort. The permanent rift with her sister serves as a reminder of the cost of Sonnenberg’s choice, with which she grapples to live.
Tragic but arresting—a worthy companion to Simone de Beauvoir’s and Vivian Gornick’s explorations of the complicated mother-daughter dynamic.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9108-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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